The head-down menace

NO pantomime is complete without the "hit my head" sketch. This is the slapstick involving two dimwitted comic characters such as the Chuckle Brothers, one holding a nail, the other a hammer. "When I nod my head, hit it," instructs the nail man. "Are you sure?" asks the hammer man. The nail man repeats the order and then nods his head. The hammer man whacks him over the head and a thousand kids explode with laughter.

KEEP that thought with you in the national debate on AI - Artificial Intelligence. The next generation of super computers may be capable of independent thought, so we'll have to be very careful in programming them. A speaker on Radio 4's Sunday show pointed out that if you ask a supercomputer to rid the world of cancer, it would probably carry out the order by killing every single cancer patient. Job done.

SO the burning question of the 21st century is how to ask computers to do what we want them to without invoking the literal truth, as in "When I nod my head, hit it." Clearly, every new computer program should be run past Paul and Barry Chuckle. Sorted.

KIM Briggs sounds like an angel. She was the much-loved 44-year-old wife and mother who died after a collision with a bicycle in London. The cyclist, Charlie Alliston, 20 and now awaiting sentence under a 150-year-old law for "wanton or furious driving" on an illegal bike, sounds like a self-centred idiot who, according to the judg, expressed no remorse. If you wanted the perfect case to toughen the laws on cycling, here it is. Except that it's not quite so clear-cut, is it?

THIS terrible accident happened when Mrs Briggs stepped into the road. According to Alliston, she was looking down at her mobile phone. That's hardly unusual these days. The so-called "head-down generation," glued to its mobiles and oblivious to danger, is probably as great a traffic hazard as cyclists with no brakes. So consider what could have happened in this freak fatal accident. A pedestrian, distracted by her mobile, steps into the path of a cyclist who brakes, is thrown over his handlebars and dies of massive head injuries. The law, which made it so hard to bring an appropriate charge against Charlie Alliston, would struggle to find any charge to bring against the pedestrian.

IT may be that cyclists have never been so reckless as they are now, but it's also true that pedestrians have never been so distracted. It would be unbalanced to create tough new laws against cyclists while doing nothing about the danger posed by head-down pedestrians.

THANKS to those of you who emailed to share my view that we have had quite enough coverage of Princess Di. All this fuss marks the 20th anniversary of her death. So five years from now, on the 25th anniversary, we can expect more - much more. For by then, we could have a new monarch and be fighting like ferrets over whether his wife should be called Queen Camilla.